In this broad, synthetic study, environmental historian Benjamin H. Johnson argues that American conservation movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a crucial part of the contemporaneous progressive movement. While mainstream historians have lavished much attention on the latter, they have unduly neglected the former, despite a general flowering of environmental history more broadly over the past several decades. Seeking a middle ground between the largely hagiographic treatments that characterized scholarship on the conservation movement until the 1990s and the often-critical accounts that have emerged since then, Johnson offers “a more comprehensive and balanced portrayal of conservation” than has heretofore been produced (4). In doing so, he highlights the “complexity, heterogeneity, ambition, and breadth” of turn-of-the century conservation initiatives, which he argues are among “the most important legacies of the Progressive era” (7).

“Conservation” first took on explicitly environmental connotations in 1907, when Gifford Pinchot proposed the term as a way to emphasize the connections between the many natural resource issues he was confronting as the head of the Forest Service, a federal agency that had been established two years earlier. Soon Horace McFarland, a champion of urban parks and city beautification, and many others embraced Pinchot's shorthand for efforts to regulate the use of nature. By 1910 the word “conservation”—which originally referred to a more general sense of protecting something for the future—appeared in newspapers twenty times more frequently than it had in the first few years of the twentieth century.

Johnson highlights the diversity of the conservation movement, which included men and women, scientists and laypeople, conservative businessmen and radical labor activists, and rich and poor supporters. While conservation was a largely Protestant, middle-class, native-born white undertaking, some African Americans also articulated visions of conservation adapted to their own experiences. Most conservationists prioritized the countryside, but many were also concerned about life in cities and suburbs, where more than one-half of all Americans resided by the 1920s. Some emphasized the material side of conservation, while others worried more about the spiritual dimensions of alienation from nature. Whatever their background, interests, or motivations, all sought to restore a “spiritually renewing and materially sustainable relationship with a nature made vulnerable by the unprecedented power of industrial humanity” (2).

The author fleshes out his thesis regarding the critical importance, complexity, and diversity of the turn-of-the-century conservation movement in six chapters, with “breadth and unity” serving as “the dominant themes” of the first two-thirds of the book and “faction and discord” characterizing its concluding chapters (8). Chapter One explores how the scientists, writers, reformers, and government bureaucrats who laid the foundations for conservation shared a belief that America's prosperity and power had produced an environmental crisis. While they agreed about the urgency of the situation, they differed about how to define the most pressing environmental problems. Some focused on the challenges presented by cities and modern industry, like fouled air and water and isolation from wild nature, while others worried more about the depletion of resources, the extinction of species, the overcutting of forests, or the threat of catastrophic wildfires. Chapter Two, “Landscapes of Reform,” explores the variety of landscapes that conservation addressed—ranging from wildlands, the rural countryside, suburbs, cities, and even human bodies—as well as the breadth of its proponents' ideologies and proposals. Here the author introduces two previously obscure activists and writers, Mira Lloyd Dock and Dana Bartlett, who were particularly concerned about public health, urban beauty, and the depletion of resources, along with several better-known conservation leaders, like John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, Liberty Hyde Bailey, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. Chapter Three explores the many ways that alienated Americans sought to get “back to nature,” either physically or psychically, in the early years of the twentieth century. “By hiking, studying wild plants and animals, reading novels about reconnecting with nature, and living in homes deliberately crafted to evoke the natural world,” Johnson notes, “conservationists hoped that Americans would revitalize themselves and deepen their appreciation for nature” (103–4).

In Chapter Four, “Fighting for Conservation,” Johnson shows how both the culture of conservation and its political agenda blossomed into a broad movement that initially drew strength from its diversity. However, success bred fragmentation as “disagreements about what conservation meant, and whose interests it ought to serve, soon led to bitter splits within the movement” (165). Chapter Five, “Fighting over Conservation,” chronicles fissures between conservationists who advocated for efficient use of natural resources and those who stressed the aesthetic and spiritual value of nature, those most concerned about urban and suburban landscapes and those focused on the countryside, and those who either embraced or expressed suspicion about the broad tent approach that had characterized conservation up to that point. Moving from internal struggles to external threats, Chapter Six examines the opposition that developed against the muscular state that conservationists had promoted, especially in the west, and the resistance that rural Americans mounted against efforts to criminalize the hunting, fishing, gathering, and logging they had long practiced and hoped to continue. The chapter also demonstrates how nature resisted conservation initiatives through forest fires, insect outbreaks, and drastic population changes in animals and plants, unanticipated and unwelcome developments “that seemed to make a mockery of the scientific management of natural resources” (199).

Environmental reform did not come to an abrupt end with the close of the 1910s, Johnson asserts in the epilogue. Echoing the eclipse of progressivism more broadly, the general expansion of the federal environmental state did pause momentarily during World War I, but with the Depression and New Deal, conservation experienced a rebirth. Even the environmental movement of the 1960s, which is often seen as a break with progressive conservation, is better understood as “both an extension and repudiation” of that earlier approach, Johnson argues (254).

Escaping the Dark, Gray City is a welcome addition to scholarship on the history of American conservation and the Progressive Era more broadly. As a thoughtful, well-organized, and interpretive synthesis that highlights the breadth, diversity, and impact of the conservation movement, Johnson's book will be appealing not only to environmental historians but to all those interested in the complex social, cultural, and political transformations that America experienced in the run-up to World War I.